The hidden agenda of aviation emissions

This shift from considering the status of natural resources to reviewing patterns of natural resource use will require the negotiations to focus on the cumulative pressures countries place on the environment in terms of "stocks" of carbon, and not future "flows", because concentrations of carbon rather than annual increments cause increases in temperature, and are at the heart of both the climate and ICAO negotiations. Therefore, there is no case for a global cap on emissions from any sector or activity independent of national limits.

The goal of "equitable access to sustainable development" agreed at Copenhagen, or access to adequate global ecosystem resources, should be in the form of sharing the global carbon budget to enable comparable levels of development. Never should the goal be to grandfather emissions in a sector benefiting existing polluters under a collective "cap", defined as a global goal, as the US and EU suggest.

In determining concentration limits, historical responsibility, in the context of Rio+20, would be replaced with a framework seeking agreement on the period of the global carbon budget that has to be equitably shared. That period could be from 1970 till at least 2050, because climate change first came onto the global agenda in the Stockholm Programme of Action in 1972, and over two thirds of global emissions have occurred subsequently.

It is also legitimate to discuss the treatment of the continuing increase in emissions after 1990 in developed countries, when they should have stabilized according to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Aviation emissions, including military emissions, should be included within national inventories through an appropriate methodology.

The ICAO resolution, as well as the objective of the UN convention, focuses on national contributions to concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere to determine what countries will do, and not on common measures to limit future aviation emissions, as suggested by the US and EU.

The author has represented India as a principal negotiator at the UNCED, Agenda 21, Rio Declaration and the Climate Change Treaty.

(China Daily 07/28/2012 page5)